Merzbiebs: Things You Think You Don’t Want to Hear

Justin Bieber is an oddly proportioned eighteen-year-old Canadian singer who is confused by glass and whose hairis under constantattackby a westerly wind. According to the social-media influence monitor Klout, Bieber has more Twitter influence (a perfect “score” of 100) than Barack Obama (a strong 94). After being discovered on YouTube roughly four years ago, Bieber began his career under the wing of the R.&B. singer Usher, and has sold over fifteen million albums.

Masami Akita is a fifty-five-year old musician from Japan who started recording under the name Merzbow in 1979, and began performing live in 1981. He sometimes calls his work “noise composition,” and at other times has used the term “Japanese noise.” He has released hundreds of recordings which, combined, have sold fewer copies than the new single by Justin Bieber, “As Long As You Love Me.” You may be under the impression that Bieber was designed solely to separate your children from their time and money, and that Masami Akita is playing an elaborate joke (or a belt grinder). All of this could be true, but none of it would make either musician trivial. They are both rooted in machines and are both worth hearing.

Alongside the Dadaists in the early twentieth century, the German artist Kurt Schwitters developed a style he called “Merz” (detached from the end of “Kommerz,” German for “commerce,” to create a new and useful scrap). As quoted in “The Collages of Kurt Schwitters,” by Dorothea Dietrich, Schwitters said,

What I had learned at the academy was of no use to me and the useful new ideas were still unready…. Everything had broken down and new things had to be made out of the fragments; and this is Merz.

“Merzbau” was the name of Schwitter’s Hanover apartment—his repository for fragments, and a fantastic cove of hard angles and gentle curves. (This video shows a reconstruction of the Merzbau presented last year at the Berkeley Art Museum. You’d name a band after it, too.) A different Schwitters quote helps explain Akita’s music, which he sometimes generates using only the equipment that amplifies instruments, not the instruments. Schwitters said, “In the war [at the machine factory at Wülfen] I discovered my love for the wheel and recognized that machines are abstractions of the human spirit.” In producing music, one can manipulate a mixing desk to generate audio feedback without the input of any outside signal. Akita, in an interview that mentions his early work, said, “I tried to quit using any instruments which related to, or were played by, the human body.”

For a recent show at a small club called Saint Vitus in Greenpoint, Akita enlisted the Hungarian drummer Balazs Pandi, who he’s been playing with since 2009. Akita played a handmade instrument that looked like a guitar while obviously not being one and a table’s worth of gear. The item that functioned like a guitar is a piece of scrap metal mounted with springs, attached to a contact mic and a power jack (which acts as the “neck” of this guitar-like non-guitar). Akita rubbed the springs and the plate with something that looked like an empty tuna can, though it was covered with a “MEAT IS MURDER” sticker. The output of the instrument went through a variety of stomp boxes—fuzz, wah, and distortion guitar pedals—as well as a ring modulator, an oscillator, and a tone generator. The output of all this went into a mixer, along with the output of an Apple laptop running “granular sound synthesis” software, which was not connected to the chain of effects processing the contact mic instrument. (I could not sort this out by looking: Akita answered a series of questions by e-mail.)

The music was entirely improvised, as it was for “Ducks: Live In NYC,” a set performed at (Le) Poisson Rouge in September of 2010 and available for purchase. The 2010 show had a fairly wide dynamic range; the set at Saint Vitus was a more intense, unified stretch of noise, broken into one long improvisation, and one shorter. Pandi is a burly man with short hair; he wore a black band T-shirt and he was tucked upstage into the left corner. He hunched over his drumset as if falling forward, or sitting on a canted platform. He was able to move from the double-kick hum of metal into a rolling, textured series of fills that were rooted in free jazz but didn’t sound much like jazz. There is evenness in Pandi’s drumming, whether driving, undergirding or coloring in, that speaks to jazz training redirected into another kind of music.

Which is what Merzbow is, at the very least. Click on this site and you’ll find examples of pink, white, and brown noise, which form the center of Akita’s language. That he may or may not sound like non-musical machines is ultimately less important than what he’s been able to find in his machines. Though the work is largely atonal and non-harmonic, it is bursting with timbre and texture and vibrancy. At Saint Vitus, Akita first set up the volume on a signal—a midrange roar of crackles and hiss, likely coming from the laptop—running full tilt into the two amplifiers standing sentry behind him. Once the wall of sound was up, he turned to his instrument, rubbing the springs vigorously with the metal can and then taking minutes to adjust dials on the desk and the boxes as the sound cascaded, both connected to him and entirely independent of him. The experience was a physical immersion as much as it was an array of data or patterns. As Pandi and Akita moved together, a roiling form cohered and a sort of peace set in.

In an e-mail, Pandi said:

The St. Vitus gigs were definitely some of the best gigs we ever played during the last three years: highly energetic, lot of communication in the music, and the perfect length for both sets. The good thing about this collaboration is that every show is totally different. Masami has always a different set-up, and I work a lot on my drumming before the shows, so I also have always something new to drop. I never bring anything with me except the kick pedal, which is crucial since I play lefty. This way I not only improvise with the music but also with the situation since I take any drums they have. My drum rider simply says: “any size, any brand, in working condition. I am left-handed.” This way, every show seems like it has the energy and excitement as the first, but with better communication through the sounds. I really feel like I could go on forever playing with him.

Akita’s most enthusiastic comment after the show was not about music: “Go vegan and save animals!” (Akita is a passionate vegan and lives in Japan, where he keeps many animals, largely birds, as pets.)

The steady stream of bullying that Bieber experiences (mostly online) almost justifies a “Save Bieber” campaign. (Bieber, was in fact, a leading supporter of the fantastic documentary “Bully,” and spoke out in favor of lowering the R rating so that younger teens could see the movie.) That minor chill is nothing compared to his popularity, so Bieber lives in harmony with the machines. In this case, the machines are a battery of managers, label folks, and handlers who help the glowing tiny human maintain his schedule and not get particularly close to anyone for more than a few minutes. (Drew Magary’s GQ profile of Bieber is essentially a story about the nature of extreme handling and the Sisyphean pointlessness of trying to ask someone like Bieber a direct question.)

Like many child stars, Bieber must invoke romance but avoid sensuality, which makes him the exact inverse of Masami Akita, who has used explicit sexual imagery since the start of his career. But the two are linked by a faith in their respective machines: Akita believes that his circuits and software will, with some urging, bring something out of themselves that reflects the human better than the human can. Bieber, like many pop listeners, is equally comfortable entrusting his career and his public person to a squad of professionals. Both reflect a diminishment of the self and an ability to accept a lesser agency in the face of what works. (What would Bieber’s songs sound like without Auto-Tune?) What works for Masami Akita is amplification, and the many outcomes when amplification is doubled and trebled. What works for Bieber is tracking and then carefully pitching to every living demographic, insofar as the data allows.

“Believe” is not unpleasant, though it does little to reveal what qualities Bieber has other than being small, very clean, and cheerful. He and his team have hired skilled writers and producers who have fixed in recorded form what a chunk of 2012’s audience might like. One of the main modes on “Believe” is to create a club track that moves in the disco-range of B.P.M. while also using the buzzing, wobbling bass of dubstep and occasionally halving the time signature and dropping into the lope that has now become familiar to most Americans, thanks to Skrillex. “As Long as You Love Me,” “Take You,” and “All Around the World” all fall into that camp. To position his eventual transition, Bieber’s team invokes other, slightly older child stars who made it into adulthood. “Boyfriend” sounds a bit like mid-aughts Atlanta snap music combined with the first Justin Timberlake album—breathless and slightly antic. The brass ring for any child-star marketing team is Michael Jackson, despite the obvious problems surrounding that particular cloud of sexuality. “Catching Feelings” has the feel of a lighter Michael track like “Human Nature”; “Die in Your Arms” goes so far as to sample the Jackson 5. Alpha rappers are featured—Drake and Nicki Minaj—and there are hints of Taylor Swift in “Fall,” an arms-aloft song about something emotional (it’s not clear what). In anticipation of increasing the number of ballads, as heartthrobs eventually must, the Bieber Machine includes “Be Alright,” a deracinated reggae song that extends the vile, aromatherapy of Jason Mraz. But this non-genre might be the safest home when Bieber hits twenty-one—who knows? The machines will tell him.